Facebook Makes Being Private More Visible

If there’s one thing Facebook users are concerned about, it’s their privacy. The leaders of the website released new sharing options this week that gives the 750 million plus members more control over what is seen on their pages.

According to a blog post by Chris Cox, the Vice President of Product at Facebook, the goal of these changes is to “make [privacy settings] more visual and straightforward.” Both the layout of the pages and the posting options are different now, so you’ll be able to control what goes up from last weekend
and what stays just a distant memory.

Inline Profile Controls

The main goal with this change was to bring privacy tools to the forefront instead of having to click-through oodles of pages to find them. Now you can control who sees each piece of your profile, from your posts to your hometown. Cox’s post also boasts that this change will bring a shorter and simpler settings page, but it’s not like many people were checking that page out in the first place.

Profile and Content Tag Review

If a friend tags you in a photo, you will now be prompted to approve or reject this before it is visible to anyone. Also, anyone who could see your posts or photos could add tags to them before, but now you have to confirm that as well. If you opt to remove the tag, you will be prompted with options: remove it from your profile, remove the tag itself, or message the photo owner/tagger and requesting the content is removed.

See a Different Point of View

The people at Facebook heard a lot of complaints about users not knowing how their profile appeared to others. This is a feature that Facebook had before that was hidden but now they moved the button to the top of your profile.

Making Edits

Up to this point, you couldn’t go back and make any changes on any status updates. Now you’ll be able to alter who you want to see it, as well as revise what you wrote.

Tagging Everyone

Facebook said that the tagging system before “felt broken or awkward if you had a photo album of co-workers and had to become Facebook friends to tag them in the photos.” Now you can add tags of anyone on Facebook.

Checking In

This feature was only available on smart phones, but now you can add your location from any device.

There were also a few small verbiage changes made, such as now it says your post is visible to the “public” instead of to “everyone.”

While many are happy about these changes, some are debating that this is an attempt for Facebook to compete with the privacy-focused Google+. But Facebook did the revamp, no matter what prompted them. And even with all these changes, there is something that many Facebook users are still posting requests for: a “dislike” button. Have you played around with the new settings yet? What do you think?